Tag Archives: silent knowledge

The coming of night affords a natural break in continuity…– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Most simply defined, the quality of our mental health reflects the degree of continuity we can maintain as our known selves, the familiar, separate human beings that we are. Familiarity rests upon a predictable world and a predictable self that interacts with that world. When our normal expectations of ourselves and the world are disrupted, our security and sanity are threatened, as reflected in psychiatric symptoms in response to this break in continuity.

Our notion of ourselves as separate beings traces back to the birth of consciousness, or the coming online of our ego. In biblical terms, this was the moment we were separated from the Garden of undifferentiated wholeness, Eden, and were cast into the world as separate, thinking beings, capable of our own decision making.

Alienated from our true energetic oneness with everything, where knowledge of what was right to do came as unthinking knowing—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call silent knowledge—our orphaned separate selves were challenged to find a way to successfully navigate life.

Thus began our history as thinking human beings, alienated from our original connection to direct silent knowledge. Knowledge obtained through thinking is grounded in rational cause and effect, observation and interpretation. Direct knowledge is channeled from the source through our greater energetic self, whom we lived more fully and intimately before the fall.

Ego, as a defined separate self, creates boundaries to ensure its unique integrity. These boundaries have the secondary effect of severing the ego’s connection to its greater energetic self, which lacks such defined boundaries. As a separate self, ego is constantly focused on its own importance as the means to maintain its integrity as a functional unit.

Nonetheless, the cynic in all of us sees through the falseness and limitations of the persona, or mask, that ego presents to the world. Underneath it all, ego is a fragile, inadequate part of the self, trying to hold its own in the world. Hence, its constant obsession with self-worth, self-esteem, and the positive attention of others, in order to bolster its fragile existence.

Our evolutionary destiny is driving us to regain our wholeness, the energetic self we left in the garden. To get there, we must break from our obsession with maintaining the self-important defense of our ego as a superior separate entity. In essence, we are all being called now to break the continuity of our ego’s stand as the one and only self.

Trauma could be defined as a break in the ego’s continuity, which forces it to confront the irrationality of power exercised beyond a rational world. Trauma levels ego; ego is completely humbled by a rupture that transcends its ability to assimilate. Lucky are those who have had the opportunity that trauma affords! And yet, we are all confronting the trauma of now!

The full assimilation of traumatic experience requires fluidity, the ability to go with the flow of what is or was, not the limits of what the ego expects the world to be. Healing, for the ego, requires an expanded ability to acknowledge power and forces that exist beyond its rational expectations.

Achievement of this expanded ego state is fundamental to ego discovering its true home, as an energetic being, first, and as a separate solid being, second. Ego is then positioned to accompany its energetic foundation on journeys in this world, and beyond, with access to the full library of silent knowledge.

Our time might be defined as a major break in continuity. Our world leaders are tricksters, who are unapologetically rupturing our expectations, throwing us into the thrill and the chaos of a tidal wave of unpredictability. From this perspective, they function like teacher shamans, recklessly opening a door, exposing us to our fuller energetic reality.

At the same time, they threaten the stability of mental health, which is dependent on a predictable world. And we see the casualties of this break in continuity in the shootings that abound daily. We are confronted with a collective PTSD of a world ego under fire. Nonetheless, healing can only be achieved by ego achieving the fluidity needed to navigate the greater energetic world that transcends rationality.

Our trickster leaders, ironically, mirror our greatest stumbling block to achieving that needed fluidity: self-importance. In fact, world leadership boldly embodies its separatist self-important superiority, ego’s greatest defense. We could say, that our leaders both deliver the punch and mirror the culprit that must be transcended if our ego is to truly find its way back to the garden of its energetic oneness with everything.

We have no choice now but to ride this train of break in continuity, as that train has already left the station without brakes. Change the metaphor, to that of the Tao, of the river that flows. Rather than try to push the river, as the ego used to do, become a riverwalker, one who knowingly walks with the flow.

When I first began channeling I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around the term. I just could not accept that channeling was what I was doing. It felt almost hokey, much too new agey for practical me. Instead, I preferred to say that I was connecting. Connecting became the term I used.

“I’m connecting with Jeanne,” I’d say. After a while I did accept the term channeling, since it seemed to explain to so many others just what it was that I was doing when I went into a deep meditative state and saw visions that somehow tumbled down on the page in front of me into words that made sense. I couldn’t really explain how that process happened, but as I went deeper into my personal history, recapitulating my past, I found that what I was doing was not all that unique. I learned that I was nothing special.

Now, as I face new steps in my personal story, I must also face what it is that I am supposed to do next with this most unspecial self.

Fearful, in the beginning, of attaching to the new age world, I have since understood its significance in our lifetime, but only as I have also understood the intent of the ancients, intentions set a long time ago. Once I understood that all knowledge is available to all of us, I was able to embrace the new age idea of channeling, finding it rooted deep within the shaman’s world.

As I did my recapitulation I found the answers to the questions I was asking about myself, seeking to know myself on the deepest levels. I wanted to find out as much about myself as I could, the answers to why I had the life I had, why I lived in the world I did, both my past and the world I live in every day. In the terminology and perspectives of the shaman’s world, and in the descriptions of experiences that mirrored my own to a tee, I found resonance. I also discovered that the shamans of ancient Mexico have a term for that new age phenomenon that we call channeling, that I had such a hard time embracing. They call it: reading infinity.

The practical me finds grounding in the shaman’s world, because I have learned that the shaman’s world is none other than this one. I don’t have to go anywhere else to have experiences that are meaningful. Everything I need is here. If I truly want to have shamanic journeys all I have to do is stay present in this life. There are plenty of experiences just waiting to take me journeying.

The so called new age phenomenon that has swept us off our feet for the past forty or so years is in fact also based in the world the shamans describe. New terms may have been applied, now commonly used, but in reality they are ancient practices that our modern world has eschewed in favor of modern science. The chemistry lab has replaced reality. Real experiences of body, mind, and spirit have been pushed aside; the ancient holistic approach to the human experience relegated to a few new agers. In fact, the intent of the ancients courses through all of us. We are all ancients and we are all new agers, we are all holistic phenomena just bursting to live in this world, in our own times.

In a pamphlet that he distributed to the participants of the Westwood Tensegrity workshop in 1996, Carlos Castaneda wrote the following:

“Silent Knowledge was an entire facet of the lives and activities of the shamans or sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times. According to don Juan Matus, the sorcerer-teacher who introduced me to the cognitive world of those sorcerers, silent knowledge was the most coveted end result they sought through every one of their actions and thoughts.”

“Don Juan defined silent knowledge as a state of human awareness in which everything pertinent to man is instantly revealed, not to the mind or the intellect, but to the entire being. He explained that there was a band of energy in the universe which sorcerers call the band of man, and that such a band was present in man. …Silent knowledge, don Juan explained, is the interplay of energy within that band, an interplay which is instantly revealed to the shaman who has attained inner silence. Don Juan said that the average man has inklings of this energetic play. Man intuits it, and gets busy deducing its workings, figuring out its permutations. A sorcerer, on the other hand, gets a blast of the totality of this interplay at any time that the rendition of this interplay is solicited.”

“…In his effort to clarify his point further, don Juan gave me a series of concrete examples of silent knowledge. The one I have liked the most, because of its scope and applicability, is something that he called readers of infinity.”

Carlos goes on to describe how the readers of infinity viewed energy, as if they were watching a movie. This ability to shift into viewing energy as it flowed in the universe, without attaching to the permutations of the mind, allowed them to access a far greater intent: all knowledge, just waiting for all of us to leave the busy workings of our minds so we too can access it. Here is how Carlos described this ability to read energy:

“Don Juan made it very clear to me that to be a reader of infinity doesn’t mean that one reads energy as if one were reading a newspaper, but that words become clearly formulated as one reads them, as if one word leads into another, forming whole concepts that are revealed and then vanish. The art of sorcerers is to have the prowess to gather and preserve them before they enter into oblivion by being replaced with the new words, the new concepts of a never-ending stream of graphic consciousness.”

“Don Juan further explained that the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who established his lineage, were capable of reaching silent knowledge after entering its matrix: inner silence. He said that inner silence was an accomplishment of such tremendous importance for them that they set it up as the essential condition of shamanism.”

Honing intent... grounded in this world

Personally, I find these descriptions fascinating. Channeling is indeed reading infinity as described by don Juan. The words appear and if one does not capture them in some way they are gone, the next ones taking their place. Access to inner silence, I can attest, is achievable through our life experiences, through blunt trauma, as well as in the inklings of reading energy that we all experience at various times throughout life. The challenge is to allow ourselves to go without fear and without judgment, by simply taking the journey as it is presented to us.

Can we hone our sorcery skills in order to be able to reach inner silence? Yes, we all can, as I did during my recapitulation. But the real challenge is, can we achieve these abilities while remaining firmly grounded in this world, staying in our everyday reality? Yes, that too is not only possible but essential.

We live in this world and we must stay in this world, have our experiences and make them relevant in our personal lives and for our times. We must not only learn to read infinity, but we must root our learning in our world so that a better balance of old age and new age may be achieved. We must help our world evolve into a holistic world once again, where the old-new phenomena are not only accessible but made meaningful and important to our times and our evolution. We must not dismiss what we don’t understand as hokey, as I once dismissed channeling, too afraid to face what it might mean about me personally.

It’s through deep inner work that we learn how to access infinity volitionally. But it’s also through deep inner work that we may lose our fears and attachments to the personal, to our self-importance, and learn that we are nothing special. Discovering that is discovering the root of the ancient sorcerer’s intent. When we get to that place, we can then turn our attentions to working on our greater personal intent for this lifetime, whatever that may be.